NBA Showtime: NBA on NBC

"Wham! Bam! In yo' face, holmes! Send you home to mama, and shi..." That's the kind of greeting you receive when starting up NBA Showtime: NBA on NBC, Midway's latest arcade-to-console basketball game. If you ever wanted proof that the NBA Jam formula still works, then play a few games with Showtime, the newest rendition, and you'll see why.

Gameplay Gamers who love challenging, fun, and irreverent two-on-two hoops are going to like NBA Showtime. It's not a sim, and it's not serious, but it's fun and engaging. Players take the court in a two-on-two situation, and can select from 130 NBA players, including the LA Lakers' center Shaquille O'Neil, who endorsed the game. From there it's an immediate, fast-paced offensive push that updates the NBA Jam style of gameplay into the millennium. Just like NBA Jam and NBA Hangtime, this game is all about dunks, three-pointers and fancy, shmancy plays. The alley-oop passes, late finger rolls, jump passes, and off-balance jumpers all work great. And the hot spots and "on fire" gameplay is also engaging and adds to the depth of the games. There is some room for basics, such as playing defense, positioning, and playing smart, but mostly NBA Hangtime rewards "highlights" style ball play, straight up.

What Midway did well in the arcade, it ported directly to the home version, mostly. Players can get right into a single game, or play a whole season, immediately. The Create-a-Player option is here in full, providing incentive and stupid looking gorillas, aliens, dinosaurs, and even more riff-raff for you to select from. The characteristics are deep enough in the attributes area (3-pointers, 2-pointers, height, weight, passing, dribbling, etc.) for players to come back often for updates and improvements. Win three games and earn one point. Correctly guess the trivia questions at the end of each game and earn as many as four points, each of which helps to improve created characters. This is one of the biggest and best incentives to return to NBA Showtime, and is one reason why this reporter keeps playing it. I want the ultimate stealing, quick-and-dirty, three-point shooter who can kick Craig Harris' butt over and over (I still have some work to do on that, I might add).

If you have played the arcade, this version -- with a couple of exceptions -- plays almost the same. Playing against, and with, the computer is quirky, though. Oftentimes the computer simply takes over. You press pass and your player -- in this case, Shaq, simply puts on the moves and drives to the basket. He doesn't always pass. If you don't share enough, Shaq -- or any other AI player -- gets angry and simply hogs the ball -- and far more often than in the arcade version.

The AI is cheap, too. It's the very nature of this kind of basketball game to be cheap, but it's worth pointing out that you will never beat a team by more than 10 points. If you are up by 15, you'll quickly lose the next 14-16 points as the AI kicks in, steals the ball, makes ridiculous three-pointers, and blocks all of your best shots. This aspect of the game hasn't changed at all from the old days, and it looks like it never will, which is a bummer. Why can't you simply flog a team if you are better? Or what's more, get flogged? At least then players might approach the game with more smarts and strategy, instead of simply shooting from the arc all day.

Last, is the four-player option, which is key fun. Using a multitap, one to four player games can compete in a two-on-two game. This is the best part of the game, by far. It requires some strategy, teamwork and skill, and it's really where NBA Showtime is at its best.

Graphics Visually, NBA Showtime leaves much to be desired. In fact, the graphics don't just hurt your eyes, they affect the gameplay more than meets the eye. First, the load times are decent, compared to any EA game for instance. The menus themselves are easy to choose from and are quick from menu to menu. This counts, especially when load times can take anywhere from 10-20 seconds on any average game.

Surprisingly, the frame rate is super fast. Midway opted to go with these, but also dropped frames in the process. The most apparent example of this problem is in dunks, where you'll see a player jump from the three-point line -- ahead of his sound effect and slam the ball in a millisecond, skipping at least three to four frames. Granted, we have an arcade game in our office so we can see the difference; and the arcade unit is PC-powered. But the effect is not just graphical. These dunks and similar plays can occasionally be blocked and stolen. In this version, blocking and playing defense in general is almost impossible.

Let's put things in perspective. The development team did a great job converting a fully 3D game into the PlayStation, and the game works efficiently, especially since the team overcame the missing floating point math to program with. But it's not without its share of problems. These mostly occur in the slow-motion wrap up scenes right after a quarter, where players are meshed or merged with one another or the rims, backboards of whatever. There is tons of flickering and clipping, just like an old movie, and it looks bad and unfinished.

Worst of all is the way the game looks during play. The players are muddy and uncrisp, and the resolution is low. It's like the players took a mud bath suiting up. The graphic quality of the players is so rough around the edges that it's hard to tell where they start and stop in a foursome. Reading the text is like taking an eye test in which the letters and numbers are made out of Corn Flakes. It's ridiculous.

But it's the combination of muddy graphics and a fast, but skipping frame rate that partially destroys the gameplay. In the arcade version you can at least sense where you player is because of the game's smooth, even flow. Here, it's like following water on a frying pan -- the players jump and bop around constantly and it's difficult to block, but it's even more difficult to retrieve the block once it's been batted away. In short, the gameplay is hurt by the graphics. If you have a Dreamcast, get that version. It's way better.

Sound There isn't much to comment here. The same repetitive NBA theme that appeared over and over on the coin-op is here with all of the same sound effects, too. You may like it once it twice, but after 10 times, it's OLD. Really OLD.

The best part of the sound is the announcer. Occasionally, he comes in late with all color-commentary, but very rarely. In fact, the announcer is far better than in just about any other basketball game in terms of speed and accuracy. His lines aren't as funny as they were in NBA Blitz, but they do the job.

The Verdict

I played a lot of this game, way too much, in fact. Casamassina says I'm addicted, and I proved him wrong, until he left the office, and then I played until my eyes were bloodshot and sore. I can stop at ANY TIME. I can...Showtime is both simplistic and cunningly addictive. Just play a few games and you'll see.

In the single player mode, after about 24 hours or a scant a week of play, you'll grow quickly tired of it. Many other games are deeper in this area. But that's where the Create-A-Player comes in. It'll keep you playing for another week. And then of course, there is the multiplayer option. There's nothing like playing two-on-two with real people with Showtime. What's even better is that sober or totally hammed, the game plays the same. In fact, in some cases, your skills increase. For kids under age, however, we don't recommend booze. Try helium or laughing gas, or about 10 cans of Coke, which pretty much has the same effect.

It's still the cheap, foul-heavy play that always manifested in NBA Jam and NBA Hangtime, but there's a certain skill to fouling and stealing, and you can get quite good at the simple basics of good defense and solid passing and still win a game. But you can't rely only on that. You need to have the cheap, scrappy defense and the high-flying slamalicious TV play that gets the crowd going wild.

My only last complaint is that keeping an "on-fire" streak alive is super hard. It only lasts a turn or so before it goes away.